BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – POVERTY REDUCTION specialists from across the Caribbean have converged in St. Kitts for a regional workshop on “Management for Development Results”.
The seminar, which runs from today (Feb. 2) to Friday (Feb. 5), is an initiative of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) through its flagship regional poverty alleviation programme, the Basic Needs Trust Fund (BNTF).
CDB Officials, regional BNTF officers and local stakeholders in poverty mitigation will be trained in the techniques and requirements for identifying, creating, implementing and monitoring sub-projects designed to attain development results.
At a ceremony to kick off the proceedings, Osbert DeSuza, Project Manager for the St. Kitts-Nevis BNTF programme, noted this was the first time that such a workshop had ever been held in the Federation. Stressing that the delegates were in for three days of “intense, eye-opening work”, he gave a brief history of the local BNTF programme.
“So far, the BNTF has conducted 31 projects in St. Kitts and 15 in Nevis. We’ve worked in areas such as health, access, education and of course, poverty alleviation. Over our past three cycles, we’ve positively affected about 27 000 persons,” DeSuza revealed.
Since the BNTF was founded in 1979, staffers across the region have worked to achieve its main objective of improving access to basic public services by poor and vulnerable communities through the provision of social and economic infrastructure and to enhance skill development through employment and community management.
The Federation is currently in the middle of BNTF cycle five, which began in 2005 and will end in July of this year. The focus of this round is on poverty alleviation through six tenets – education, health, skills training, access, water and maintenance.
Elvis Newton, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Social and Community Development, expressed his gratitude at the BNTF efforts over the years. He promised that he would lobby the government to ensure the creation of a national poverty reduction action plan, long a wish of the local BNTF office.
In St. Kitts-Nevis’ most recent CDB-conducted Country Poverty Assessment (April 2009), researchers stated that poverty in St. Kitts had decreased from 30 percent to 23.7 percent, while sister isle Nevis recorded a drop from 32 percent to 15.9 percent.
With that statistic in mind, Newton admitted there was still “a long way to go” in local poverty reduction efforts, especially in St. Kitts, but he nonetheless reaffirmed his ministry’s commitment to reducing poverty to zero percent.
